This blog is a place for me to post my homilies and other assorted things

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Repent...

Third Sunday of Lent Year C 2013:

Lent
is a season of prayer and penance. It is
a time to enter the desert with Jesus, a time to look at our lives and repent
of our sinfulness. And I believe that
the theme of repentance is the proper context for us to understand our gospel
reading today. This is an interesting,
if not strange passage in the gospel.
What is Jesus getting at?

First,
Jesus addresses the concerns that some of the people have about certain
tragedies or atrocities that happened in his day. There was the massacre of Herod and the loss
of life when a tower fell. We could add
tragedies from our own times: the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Katrina disaster,
the Newtown massacre, just to name a few.
Jesus responds to what must have been an idea prevalent at the time,
namely that these bad things happened to these people because they were bad
people, and God was punishing them. I
heard similar things about our own tragedies, that 9/11 was God's response to
abortion, or that Katrina was God's way of cleansing the sin of Bourbon Street. But, Jesus instantly rejects this idea and so
should we. Why does Jesus do this? I think there are two reasons.

First,
if we say that God does bad things to bad people, what does that say about
God? Do we really want to think of
disasters or tragedies as God inflicting punishment on sinners? This doesn't sound loving or merciful. This kind of behavior sounds petty and
vindictive. Do we really want to say
that God is petty and vindictive? We
must remember that God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son,
so that all those who believe in him might not perish but might have eternal
life. Also, God sent Jesus not to
condemn the world, but to save the world.
We will often hear in times of sadness or tragedy, that God has a
plan. But, we must always be careful to
remember that God never causes evil. It
is certainly true that when evil occurs, whether it is natural evil like
hurricanes or moral evil like the Newtown tragedy, that God can bring good out
of the suffering, he aids us in our times of need. But, God does not cause evil.

The
second reason Jesus dismisses this idea is that he wants to remind us that repentance
is for everyone. If we think that God
inflicts tragedy on bad people, and we are not the recipients of a tragedy, then
we must be perfectly fine. This kind of
thinking goes like this: "Well God punished New Orleans with Katrina,
those people must have been bad, good thing I am so awesome..." A certain lack of humility will set in and we
will forget about our basic need for repentance. We are all sinners and we all need to
change. And, the stakes are high: Jesus
says that if we don’t repent we will perish.

This
doesn’t mean that God is out to get us.
So you don’t have to worry that if you sin the St. Matt’s bell tower is
going to fall on you when you leave the church today. But, it is definitely true that sin kills the
sinner. It is not that God kills us if
we sin; rather, it is that we are killing ourselves by our sinfulness. And this is not a physical kind of death, but
rather a spiritual death. Sin is not
good for us, it leads us away from God, it detaches us from one another, it
leads to loneliness and isolation, hardship and suffering. So, we should repent of our sinfulness not
simply because we are afraid that God will “get us.” Rather, each of us should move away from our
sinfulness because we want more. We were
made for life, not death; for happiness, not sadness; for peace, not for
violence.

Jesus
doesn’t call us to repentance so as to accuse us of our sinfulness; rather,
hear his words as a loving invitation.
We stand at the crossroads, one way leads to sin, sadness, and
death. The other leads to life,
happiness, and peace. Which way will we
choose?